As Capt. Tom Davis stands at the tailgate of the military cargo plane, the night air sweeps through the hold. His eyes search the black terrain 1,200 feet below. He grips the canvas of his reserve parachute and takes a deep breath.

Davis and the men who make up his Special Forces A-team are among the most highly trained soldiers in the U.S. Army. It’s 1972, and Davis isn’t far removed from a tour in Vietnam, where he operated along the Cambodian border. His communications sergeant served in Command and Control North, which was responsible for some of the most daring operations in the heart of North Vietnamese territory. But none of the men has ever been on a mission like this before.

Their plan: drop into Eastern Europe, make their way undetected through forested mountains, and destroy a heavy-water plant used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

Leading up to the operation, during four days of preparation, Army regional experts briefed them on routes of infiltration and anticipated enemy patrols. The team pored over aerial photographs and an elaborate mock-up of the target — a large, slightly U-shaped building. It’s situated in a wide, open area with a roving guard, but at least the team won’t have to sneak inside.

Hanging awkwardly from the parachute harness of Davis’s intelligence sergeant is a 58-pound nuclear bomb.

Hanging awkwardly from the parachute harness of Davis’s intelligence sergeant is a 58-pound nuclear bomb. With a weapon this powerful, they can just lay it against a wall, crank the timers, and let fission do its work.

Do not have much time. I thought the article was interesting enough to share. Its amazing how ingenious we can become if we want to do damage/harm/kill someone else.

Gun-type fission weapon (Little Boy). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This image was selected as a picture of the week on the Malay Wikipedia for the 44th week, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chess problem.

I play chess and have been working on being a better player. I only recently started playing quite a bit…. vs Shredder. I am really very very good at Backgammon. I am either World Class or Expert level most of the time.

Take a set of chess pieces and throw them all away except for one knight. Place the knight on any one of the 64 squares of a chess board.

Can you make 63 legal moves so that you visit every square on the chess board exactly once? As a reminder, a knight can move two squares in a straight line, followed by a ninety degree turn and a move of one further square. It might seem like a hard task, but this set of moves, called the knight’s tour, can be achieved in too many ways to count.

If you are able to make the 63 moves and end up on a square from which you can move back to the original square with the 64th legal move, then this is known as a closed tour. Other tours are called open tours.

This article is really about a math problem and the way to solve it.. Ants apparently use this technique all the time.

I have been very very interested in Cyberwarfare for several years. The discovery of Stuxnet was a signal of a new type of War in my estimation… It turns out it might be more difficult then previously imagined to wage Cyberwarfare.

WHY IT MATTERS

A virus can ruin a computer; a cyberweapon can disable a power plant.

Like the atomic bomb in the waning days of World War II, the computer virus known as Stuxnet, discovered in 2010, seemed to usher in a new era of warfare. In the era of cyberwar, experts warned, silent, software-based attacks will take the place of explosive ordinance, tanks, and machine guns, or at least set the stage for them.

Or maybe not. Almost four years after it was first publicly identified, Stuxnet is an anomaly: the first and only cyberweapon ever known to have been deployed. Now some experts in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure want to know why. Are there fewer realistic targets than suspected? Are such weapons more difficult to construct than realized? Or is the current generation of cyberweapons simply too well hid?

Such questions were on the minds of the world’s top experts in the security of industrial control systems last week at the annual S4 conference outside Miami. S4 gathers the world’s top experts on the security of nuclear reactors, power grids, and assembly lines.

At S4 there was broad agreement that—long after Stuxnet’s name has faded from the headlines—industrial control systems like the Siemens Programmable Logic Controllers are still vulnerable.

Eireann Leverett, a security researcher at the firm IOActive, told attendees at the conference that commonplace security practices in the world of enterprise information technology are still uncommon among vendors who develop industrial control systems (see “Protecting Power Grids from Hackers Is a Huge Challenge”). Leverett noted that modern industrial control systems, which sell for thousands of dollars per unit, often ship with software that lacks basic security controls like user authentication, code signing to prevent unauthorized software updates, or event logging to allow customers to track changes to the device.

It is also clear that, in the years since Stuxnet came to light, developed and developing nations alike have seized on cyber operations as a fruitful new avenue for research and development (see “Welcome to the Malware Industrial Complex”). Laura Galante, a former U.S. Department of Defense intelligence analyst who now works for the firm Mandiant, said that the U.S. isn’t just tracking the activities of nations like Russia and China, but also Syria and Stuxnet’s target of choice: Iran. Galante said cyberweapons give smaller, poorer nations a way to leverage asymmetric force against much larger foes.

Even so, truly effective cyberweapons require extraordinary expertise. Ralph Langner, perhaps the world’s top authority on the Stuxnet worm, argues that the mere hacking of critical systems doesn’t count as cyberwarfare. For example, Stuxnet made headlines for using four exploits for “zero day” (or previously undiscovered) holes in the Windows operating system. But Langner said the metallurgic expertise needed to understand the construction of Iran’s centrifuges was far more impressive. Those who created Stuxnet needed to know the exact amount of pressure or torque needed to damage aluminum rotors within them, sabotaging the country’s uranium enrichment operation.